USA

ZoomSci: Science and Engineering Projects for Kids

News and technology for Kids.
PBS Parents is a trusted resource that’s filled with information on child development and early learning. It also serves as a parent's window to the world of PBS KIDS, offering access to educational games and activities inspired by PBS KIDS programs.

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Public Broadcasting Service in the USA.

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2014

Kids.gov: video and resources for education

Kids.gov is organized into three audiences: Grades K-5, Grades 6-8, and Educators. Each audience tab is divided into educational subjects like Arts, Math, and History. Within each subject, the websites are grouped as either government sites (Federal, state, military) or other resources (commercial, non-profit, educational). The sites listed under the other resources category are maintained by other public and private organizations. When users click on these links, they are leaving Kids.gov and are subject to the privacy and security policies of the owners/sponsors of the outside websites.

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Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit

This toolkit contains the process and methods of design along with the Designer’s Workbook, adapted specifically for the context of K-12 education. It offers new ways to be intentional and collaborative when designing, and empowers educators to create impactful solutions.

Free download of the toolkit.

Design Thinking is the confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, and a process to take action when faced with a difficult challenge. That kind of optimism is well needed in education.

Classrooms and schools across the world are facing design challenges every single day, from teacher feedback systems to daily schedules. Wherever they fall on the spectrum of scale—the challenges educators are confronted with are real, complex, and varied. And as such, they require new perspectives, new tools, and new approaches. Design Thinking is one of them.

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The Open Video Project

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.
The Open Video Project began in 1998 with the development of a basic framework and the digitization of the initial content, about 195 video segments. Additional video was also contributed by the CMU Informedia Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Prelinger Archives. This first stage of this project also included entering metadata for each segment into a database, and creating this Web site to enable researchers to access the available video.
In the next stage of the project, the project continues to add video segments to the repository, expanding both the available formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and QuickTime) and genre characterics (student television, anthropological footage, technology demonstrations) of the video. As part of its work at UNC's Interaction Design Lab, it is also doing research on creating innovative interfaces to the video repository that enable users to more easily search, browse, preview, and evaluate the video in the collection.

Copyright Issues
The Open Video repository provides video clips from a variety of sources, especially various video programs obtained from U.S. government agencies such as the U.S. Records and Archives Administration and NASA. Although the government agency videos were produced with public funds and are freely available from the Archives, no copyright clearance has been obtained for audio or video elements in these productions. The project encourages researchers to use the data under fair use for research purposes. Those wishing to use these video clips in any commercial enterprise must bear the burden of obtaining copyright clearances.

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The Open Video Project is sponsored by and developed at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The project is supervised by Dr. Gary Marchionini and Dr. Barbara M. Wildemuth and currently developed primarily by Dr. Gary Geisler and Yaxiao Song. People who used to be actively involved in the developing team include Rich Gruss, Meng Yang, Xiangming Mu, Anthony Hughes, Thomas Tolleson, and Curtis Webster. The initial framework for the repository was developed by Laura Slaughter as part of the Baltimore Learning Community Project at the University of Maryland and she collected and digitized much of the first stage of video content. Please contact the project if you have suggestions, questions, video to contribute, or would like more information about the project.

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MIT Blossoms

BLOSSOMS video lessons are enriching students' learning experiences in high school classrooms from Brooklyn to Beirut to Bangalore. Its Video Library contains over 50 math and science lessons, all freely available to teachers as streaming video and Internet downloads and as DVDs and videotapes.
The BLOSSOMS Video Library contains lessons to use in your classroom. Every lesson is a complete resource that includes video segments, a teacher’s guide, downloadable hand-outs and a list of additional online resources relevant to the topic. MIT carefully crafts each BLOSSOMS lesson to make your classroom come alive. Each 50-minute lesson builds on math and science fundamentals by relating abstract concepts to the real world. The lessons intersperse video instruction with planned exercises that engage students in problem solving and critical thinking, helping students build the kind of gut knowledge that comes from hands-on experience. By guiding students through activities from beginning to end, BLOSSOMS lessons give students a sense of accomplishment and excitement.
While MIT faculty members and partnering educators in Jordan and Pakistan created the first BLOSSOMS lessons, today educators from around the world create and submit BLOSSOMS modules. MIT Blossoms welcomes contributors to join their international online community to learn more about their videos and to engage with educators worldwide who are looking for ways to enrich their students' classroom experiences and share their ideas.

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MIT App Inventor

App Inventor is a Web-based program development tool to create mobile applications without a need for prior programming experience. With this tool you can create the app in the browser by dragging and dropping features and behaviour options.
You can preview the app during the developing process through a live connection between computer and mobile device.

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DocsTeach

DocsTeach brings together more than 3,000 primary sources and seven online activities, each designed to reinforce specific historical thinking skills. Register for free, search or browse the primary sources, and bookmark any that interest you. Head over to the "Activities" section to plug sources into any of the site's seven activity templates, and then save new activities for use in the classroom—or publish them to share with other DocsTeach users. To add a twist, ask students to make, present, and take activities of their own—activity creation is simple enough and web-savvy students should be up to the task.

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MIT Video

The MIT Video website aggregates and curates video produced by the Institute's offices, laboratories, centres and administration. This includes feature and editorial videos, event recordings, academic content and more. Each day, the editorial team at MIT Video selects one or more videos to "spotlight" based on the videos' content, production value and timeliness.

MIT Video currently contains more than 12,000 videos. Here are some of the most recently added and featured.

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PowToon - video creation

PowToon is a nice service for creating explanatory videos through a drag and drop process.
The mission is to "create the world’s most minimalist, user friendly and intuitive presentation software that allows someone with no technical or design skills to create engaging professional “look and feel” animated presentations".
The videos that users create feature digital paper cut-outs on a colorful background. This online tool let users create videos in the style made popular by Common Craft. It provides drawings of people and objects that users can arrange on blank canvas. After adding their narration to the arrangement users can publish their videos.
On the website (http://www.powtoon.com/tutorials/) there is a collection of tutorials on how to use the service.
PowToon's offers a free version for educators (http://www.powtoon.com/pricing/edu/), but it’s limited to 30 days and it limits videos to 45 seconds.
The service is in Beta version.

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Pixorial - video creation

Pixorial is an online video creation tool with an intuitive user interface.
To create a video in Pixorial users can upload pictures and raw video footage then organize that media into the sequence in which users want it to appear. They can insert transitions between elements by selecting them from the transitions gallery. If they would like to add a soundtrack to your production they can select one from the Pixorial gallery or upload your own audio files. Pixorial also makes it easy to add text to each picture or video that users upload.